


it started from your arms (it is a catalyst)

by Rush_That_Speaks



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Body Horror, Body Modification, Consent Issues, F/M, Kink, Kink Negotiation, Mind Games, Mind/Mood Altering Substances, Object Insertion, gaming the system, possible dubcon, societally produced consent issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-11
Updated: 2013-01-11
Packaged: 2017-11-25 02:11:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/634009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rush_That_Speaks/pseuds/Rush_That_Speaks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything could be so much easier if the two of you were black for one another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it started from your arms (it is a catalyst)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [we used to play outside when we were young](https://archiveofourown.org/works/522006) by [roachpatrol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol). 



> Thanks to Sovay for looking at this for me, Roachpatrol for being gracious about my using her concepts, and Asuka Kureru for generally being awesome.

"Shipwright," you say. "TZ."  
  
You do not get an answer. Her chin's on her chest, and her fingers are clenched around her own elbows, nails scraping at the slick black of her uniform, the underlayers of her uniform, black unitard and no insignia. She's rocking a little, chewing on her own lip, and you know that behind her shades those blank red eyes are squeezed too tight.  
  
"Pyrope," you say. "Redglare. Child of dragonth, get your damn ass back over here--"  
  
Her cane's on the floor at her feet and that worries you. You knew tonight was going to be hard, you've always known it, but still this wasn't quite the way you saw it going badly.  You sigh and brace, sharp in the nose out the mouth, scrabble your feet on the floor and push with your toes to get some weight on them, so prickly-asleep that you wince. And then you wince again when the pressure on your feet eases the cuffs on your wrists, and your fast-pumping bloodpusher forces life back through your hands in one spiked wave of burning twitch. You try to ignore your hands, which focuses you more on your shoulders, and you don't want to think too hard about your shoulders or the feeling of wrongness is going to spread down into your stomach and this isn't helping your matesprit and she needs you, she needs you, ignore the damn body.  
  
You can't psionically slap her hung as you are in your limiters so you'll just have to do it with your airsacs.  
  
"Terezi, dammit, _pull yourthelf together Legislacerator_ \--" voice loud and harsh like a whip and you see it get through. She keeps hugging herself but her head comes up and you hear her sniff in your direction, and then another sniffle to try to clear the teal tears running down her face from out of her smell-range.  
  
"Override," she says, "override. I _can't_ , this would be so much easier if you were my kismesis."  
  
Gog, she pities you so much, doesn't she, your sharp girl who'll never leave a courtroom without seeding it with gallowsfruit, who kisses you with sloppy tongue and then tells you nauseating details about what the interior topography of your head looks like to her seeing-senses of smell and taste. Who's laughed at your attempts to get out of eating and exercising when you both know she picks the times to bother you about it that you're genuinely the most sucked right into your computers. Whose lusus is one of the most frightening things you've ever laid eyes on despite being, literally, a featureless wall of eggshell and iridescence. And who, right now, is crying for you, and it's beautifully pitiable.  
  
"Flushed for you, TZ," you say, "like it that way, but you know there'th no override this time."  
  
"Yes," she says, "I set that up myself," and you haven't heard that bitterness in her voice since the last time she talked with you about the spiderbitch, that's not good.  
  
"We thet it up," you say, "you did it tho well, it wath really amazing. I mean, I knew you were going to, I knew when, we arranged all the detailth, and you still managed to get the drop on me when I wasn't expecting it? Fucking impressive, woman."  
  
"I learned a lot from Vriska," she says, and this is not good even one little bit; you want to tell her more about how cool she is, how this is the best she could possibly have done by you and better than you had imagined, but you're scared too, and you hurt from your fingernails to the tips of your toe-claws, not neglecting any bits in between. And the memory of Vriska hangs in the air, a blue fog, some of the things you both had done for her, chase and hunt and catch and trap and hurt. But you're more over Vriska than Terezi may well ever be, because at least you never, ever had a choice.  
  
"C'mere," you say, shakily, and she does, puts her arms around your waist and digs her cheek into your upper thoracic bone-struts. All angles and horn-tip scraping your chin and the cool skin of a higherblood. "Take off the flightsuit."  
  
She shimmies it off and presses back to you, skin against bare skin except for her cherry-red panties, a comforting press against your fever-heated body. You feel water trickling down your chest into her hair, wish for your glasses since she's just a little blurry. At least she turned the shower off. She'd caught you in your own ablutions block and strung you from the ceiling of the cubicle; truly, your admiration for this woman knows no boundaries.  
  
Your bulge is awake, of course, has been since all this started, and you know it's not just water slicking your thighs and rolling down your spread legs. At this point in your relationship your bulge would probably unsheathe from the power of suggestion if she slapped regular handcuffs on you, let alone the real deal shutting you inside your head. She's interested, too, you can tell by the writhing in the front of her panties, and for a moment that is everything you want, to pail here, messily, above the drain without a thing to catch the slurry, and then get down and go get some breakfast and curl up together for a while and you are not going to let your feelings get the pair of you culled.  
  
Because it is too fucking late for an alternative and you don't even have to say it. But it is still her decision.  
  
When she moves to take her panties off you think the two of you have lost, but she only winds her bulge around yours once and strokes, twiningly, like a kiss but far more intimate. Nibbles on your chest a little, not bothering to push in with her teeth. Licks, slurpingly, the point of your chin.  
  
Then her shark-grin snaps into place, all black lips and edges, and you see the manic burning in her blind eyes even beyond her shades as she clasps her own hands behind your back and _leans_ backwards, pulling your full weight and much of hers onto your dislocated shoulders.  
  
You scream, of course, because you can feel that in the pit of your stomach as your shoulder-joints stretch farther from where they ought to be, with a nasty crackling, and you know she's made her choice because those aren't going back in, ever, not torn up like that. You're crying too, it was tears she was licking off your chin (she's always liked the taste of yellow) and you can't tell right now whether it's from pain or terror or sheer gratitude.  
  
She steps away from you, draws up to her full height. "Helmsman Captor," she barks. And then, softer, "Sollux."  
  
"Yeah," you say blurrily, "thtill right here, Captain." Your mind is trying not to be, but you think you may actually have achieved the condition of too much in pain to pass out from it, if that's possible.  
  
"Good boy," she says, "keep that up. You remember that personnel issue we were discussing half a perigee ago?" She doesn't wait for you to nod. She knows you remember; it's the main thing the two of you hadn't found a fix for. "I solved it." And she turns, and goes to the shower cubicle door, and opens it, and shows you--  
  
You don't know how she did it, what she begged or borrowed or stole or traded, but Terezi is holding an entire spool of shipgrade livewire and even with your ridiculously huge hivestem it's long enough to reach down the stairs to the front door. "You're coming with me when it happens," she says, and you have never heard anyone be so smug so justifiably.  
  
"Fuck, TZ," you breathe, "come over here and get your jacks in me, who needth legth anyway." And she pulls a giant-ass toolkit from her sylladex, and comes around behind you, and does it.  
  
The odd and rather disappointing thing is that it barely hurts at all. Most of the things she's done the times you've roleplayed this have been geometric iterations worse, and you whine, and she laughs at you. "This is delicate equipment here, Helmsman! Not designed to make a whole lot of useless trollmeat thrash around and smash right into it." Which makes sense, but how are you going to know when she turns it  
  
she turns it on. Them on. The jacks on. One two three four right up and down your vertebral strut, hammered right into your support column. You've never felt anything like it, like this part of your brain that is literally being rewritten and shaped differently, vertiginous and queasily pleasurable and badness and jegus you could come if she just brushed you right, and your nook spasms and subsides, not quite enough.  
  
She comes around the front of you and prods you hard in the knee with the tip of her cane. You can see the skin dent, see the blood trickle down, yellow-bright, but it doesn't matter. You certainly can't feel it and you don't know why you'd want to. That isn't part of you anymore. The part of you that says where you is knows it isn't. And, blessedly, your (notyour) arms and shoulders have shut up their grumbling, only a faint residual ache left around your shoulderblades, which would like to know why they're being stretched so much by a lot of deadweight. It is oddly peaceful. You have been afraid of this and maybe-wanted this so very, very long.  
  
You open your eyes (when did you close them?) and you smile. Your voice sounds more normal to you than it has the whole evening. "When you gonna chop them off?" you ask her.  
  
"Not till we get to the ship," she tells you. "We really don't have the facilities here for that kind of possible large-scale blood loss."  You nod. That makes sense to you. But you think you'd nod even if it didn't. You think you're still nodding, just to feel your chin move, see the shadows of your horns flickering, up and there's Terezi (fucking gorgeous), down and hello floor and drain and tile and toes you honestly can't know whether you will ever miss. Maybe the two of you could get them stuffed and framed or something. Wow, you are so motherfucking high, the hell did that happen. Built into the jackware probably.  
  
Terezi is sniffing at you a little sidelong. Guess you must look as high as you're feeling. "Status report, Helmsman," she says, crisply enough, but you can hear in it a little shadow, still, of the spiderbitch terrors. "What's it like in there?"  
  
And you realize you'd shrug if you could. Heh. Okay, shrugging you are going to miss. "Endorphin rush, Captain, and something built into the thystem, but all boardth look green from where I'm sitting."  
  
"I know about the calmdrugs. What about when the rush wears off?"  
  
"Not sure. But Terezi?" You stare directly at her, knowing she'll get the intensity even though she can't see the precise expression. "I'm a mustardblood and I'm too damn strong. If it wathn't you, it was gonna be thomebody. All boards are green from where I'm sitting."  
  
 She hugs you again. You both have known it, from the time this started. You're a good enough hacker to run maybe forever, dodge into the hills or into a low-psi spaceship construction job lifting heavy metal struts. You could forge papers, take drugs, bleed a faker different yellow for the prods of the docterrorists. Tag yourself culled or burned out in the Imperial networks. But you were never going to outrun the fear and the wondering, when and whether, who, how, how bad it would have to be. Or the dreams, the nightmares and the ones that aren't. Therefore: you aren't the strong one, not as strong as Terezi. You weren't going to give yourself the chance to break because if you did you'd leave her and the two of you are all the two of you have got left.  
  
Better she feed your bones to her forest than you forget her name kidnapped into the service of Her Imperious Condescension.  
  
Doesn't hurt one bit the good it will do for her status, either, taking you like this.  
  
She kisses you, and neither of you have to say any of that, and the kissing is achingly quiet.  
  
You're both going to get stupidly sentimental if things keep going this direction. Time to break the mood a little. "How about we try that wire?"  
  
She bounces away and comes back up with it, waving the live end under your nose as though you'll see it better her way. "Absolutely! I'll get the cameras hooked to it so they'll be pre-melded when we plug it into you, and then we'll take a little trip together."  
  
When you take your first blinking look through the camera-eyes (oddstrange) (not _too_ odd) (you'll learn it) you can't help but grin so hard you hurt yourself, because she's put in color filters. The left camera sees in glimmering blues and aquas and the right in shades of red. It'll do fine. There's been a little lag while you were sorting out what went where (the new camera-eyes feel like they're in your head, not off a wire from your tailbone, but the wire feels like, you guess, a tentacle, and your head still feels like your head, except the eyes aren't in it, but they are, but can't be, and they aren't on the tentacle either and software-wrestling in your own brain's a bitch). So what you see through your ( _glasses_ ) (it just works better that way) are the stairs of your hivestem leading downwards as Terezi carries you, and you have to yell pretty loudly to carry down a couple of stories.  
  
"TZ! Bitching glasses! Thank you!" And you know the cameras have no audio pickup, but you can swear you hear and feel her laughing anyway, all the way down to the bottom.  
  
  
  
She licks each lens tenderly and then wipes them off on her sleeve before installing the cameras, one on each side of the entryway. Squares her shoulders, takes a firm grip on her cane, and turns her back to your hive with military precision. Steps away without looking backward. She has business. There are so many things that could only be done after this was real, after this could no longer unhappen, and you discussed this too and it's still bad.  
  
In fact it's horrible, once your brain lets you come down again and you find yourself aching all over and with a fuzzy headache that feels like it's your powers pushing at the bounds of the limiters. You know down to the minute exactly what she needs to do and how long it should take for her to do it, but you can't fucking move and you don't have a computer and the interior of your ablution block is wearing at your nerves and it's not as though there is much way to tell the time in here. You cry again, for a while. Doesn't help much.  
  
What if she doesn't come back? What if she calls the Imperial recruiters? She wouldn't, would she? What if something eats her? What if, you don't know, her lusus hatches and picks her up with gorgeous pearled claws and she learns to fly on dragonback and never wants a starship and the world burns around you? What if she hates you now, drag on her resources, stupid pissblood who thought he'd be a lovely pet for a fledgling legislacerator? It's called the Cruelest Bar for a reason. Is she practicing her cruelty? You still can't hate her, you realize, and you had wondered whether you were going to flip your quadrant, both of you had wondered, and you were betting your peace of mind that you wouldn't but what if she has? What if she can't be flushed for you anymore when you've become this thing? You won't make a very good rival, not challenging enough to be a real kismesis, not even a real troll anymore by Empire standards, you've made yourself a piece of gogdamn furniture for this girl and what did you think you were even doing. You cling to the red-and-blue view from downstairs as the only thing that matters now, and nothing, but nothing, is happening down there, it's so quiet, you are spending this day awake and hanging from your own fricking ceiling, and it is day now, the sun has risen. Not even hopbeasts wander by between the towers of the hives around you, all your neighbors tucked tight into their recuperacoons the way you were planning to be. Never a recuperacoon again, there's another thing, never Terezi's hair trailing over you still wet from sopor, and the sunlight does not hurt the camera-eyes but that only reminds you how strange everything is now in the silence of the lawnrings.  
  
Not even a breeze down there, not even anything blowing, and the void between the stars cannot be this silent as it reaches up and swallows you whole.  
  
That first spasm of blinding terror gives way eventually because, even though you are in far less pain than it would be reasonable for you to be if you were still hung up by any part of your real body, you are exhausted and you're hungry from exhaustion. You had been going to have a snack after your shower. There is, of course, no way you can obtain any snackstuffs.  
  
And you know why your stomach is empty when you think about it-- because you may be in your ablutions block but the load gaper might as well be in the Furthest Ring, and you're over a drain because Terezi thinks of everything but that would just be too embarrassing-- but it feels, in the place all your emotions are ricocheting around, as though she left without feeding you because she didn't think you were pitiable enough to need it.  
  
You try to make that help. Make that mean you just aren't that badly off. It could be worse, right?  
  
It cannot, you are and it doesn't.  
  
After a while you become aware you're screaming.  
  
After a while you become aware your throat hurts. Your bees are in their midday somnolence, no friendly buzzing, and they tend to avoid the ablution block anyway because of the damp, so no help or distraction that way. You can hear, when you think about it, your lusus rattling and roaring on the roof, distressed at your distress, but you know he can't break his chain and even if he could he can't fit down the stairwell.  
  
This would suck so damn much less if you had your powers but that limiter's another whole layer of fuzzy stinking slush between you and the whole universe, clinging muck of set-apart and separate that rubs into you how helpless, how fucking stuck, no Terezi no Terezi _where's Terezi_  
  
and you only come out of that one because that layer of terrible feels as though it's fraying a little around the base of your left camera, a tiny itchy bite where the wire's insulation wasn't quite wrapped all the way around the connection and that exposed wire is your nerve and it's so far away so far away from your awful cuffs and you lean into it, make that itch itchier. Careful careful can't blow out the camera you don't want to break your glasses, shades are just too delirious biznasty to get all cracked now, gorgeous glasses that you love because you can feel yourself living through them, and just the faintest trickle of entwined red-and-blue psychic lightning pushing out through that itchiness and damn if you can't slice that insulation off the wire clean as if you were holding the pliers.  
  
After that it's a very short time before there are shreds of insulation just all over the stairwells, and you think that noise you hear is yourself drunkenly giggling. You can get about five feet from yourself before you can't make the psi work, your nice new tentanerve a conduit leading right out through the sphere of blankness and then after that sphere, well, you could do about anything, except reach out to telekinetically manipulate most of the objects in your hive because you don't remember exactly where you left everything and you can't see the entire rest of your apartment DAMMIT. And you don't want to move the wire too much because those cameras got to stay connected.  
  
There is one thing you can think of to do, and it's a thunderclap, lightning through the air so fast it makes the air split after it, and it's a loud noise. Draws a howl from your lusus.  
  
Most importantly, it wakes the sleeping bees, and they send emissaries to see what you're up to.  
  
The hive is confused by your aberrant beehavior. They do not understand why you are hanging from the ceiling and they are outright upset when you speak to them and there is no psychic orderset behind your voice. You see them dance a while in a mix of curiosity, vengeful glee, and worry. What a fine little computer system. They nearly have intelligence. Their debate about what to do about you now almost contains self-awareness.  
  
And then they decide, and one of them hovers in front of your mouth. You are sick/hurt/child/broodingyoung/responsibility and they will take care of you. The bee bears honey.  
  
You do not under any circumstances eat the mind honey.  
  
These aren't any circumstances. It tastes like electricity, which you know for a fact now, actually.  
  
Good hive. Buzz friends.  
  
The only way you could possibly describe what happens next, if you were to try afterwards, which you mostly won't because it hurts to think about, is that as far as you can gather your entire hiveblock inverts itself, flips all its colors several times, and engages in some bizarre mating ritual with a multidimensional horrorterror intent on destroying the entire surrounding area. Also you simultaneously go blind, die and resurrect yourself four or five times, and, though you wouldn't swear to this part, turn into a frog. It is very important to you, though you have no idea why, to find out whether the color of the frog is red or blue, and nobody will tell you.  
  
There are _reasons_ you do not eat the mind honey.  
  
In physical actuality you're pretty sure nothing happens. But it is an amazingly less boring and amazingly not less terrifying way to spend the rest of this worst afternoon.  
  
After a while you're hung in a gray space that isn't the ablution block, and somebody's scritching between your horns on the left back side. The person doesn't have to strain to reach them, taller than you, an adult of some sweeps maturity, and it feels wonderful and you let yourself relax into it. He never comes around in front of you but you can see him anyway, except you can't because he's got some dramatic hood-cape business going on. The stubby little horns coming through it remind you faintly of somebody you knew once, somewhere else and a long time ago, but this guy is way taller and also way more silent. His other arm is stretching off to scratch somebody else's horns, somebody who's hanging here the same way you are, mirror image, and that seems right to you, though you have no idea what these people are doing here. Wherever here is.  
  
He gently eases his hand out of your hair some indeterminate amount of time later and whaps you on the back of the head lightly, like he's shooshpapping you and urging you forward at the same time, and you know what he means by it, and you do an acrobatic fucking pirouette back into your body.  
  
Where your glasses pick up sunset, and the white flash of Terezi's cane moving toward you in the dimness, and you aren't ashamed to sob in relief. When you two drew up the list of things to do your list for this part had precisely one thing on it, and you know that you have done it, and it was the hardest thing you've ever done and winning is its own reward. She said it over and over again, while your plans were still a sweep away, knowing you'd remember when you needed it:  
  
 _You are Sollux motherfucking Captor. Stay sane for us, asshole._  
  
  
  
The sweeping arc of her cane is like a fucking clearshot kill on the hardest level of your hardest gamegrub, like water after you've been coding for fifty straight hours and forgotten to get out of the chair at all, like the gentle way your lusus puts you on his shoulder. You don't think you've ever seen anything so beautiful, except the rest of her walking along after it. She's as tall and proud and finely moving as she was when she left you, and she's wearing her Redglare outfit, all complete except no noose at her side, and it's her best cane, the one with the swordblade etched with insults and the pocket in the dragon's head stuffed full of candied beetles. She looks ready to kick ass and take names, which is just as well, because she does not come unaccompanied.  
  
This had been a possible scenario, that she could be running just a little behind, that she could be met on her way back instead of in your hive. It is not the worst of the scenarios; you have already dodged one or two of the most horrible. But it's not good, because she isn't going to be able to come upstairs to see you before she has to play her hand, and for all she knows what she's got up there is a dead matesprit or a worse-than-dead one, something hate-maddened who would snap her neck the moment she takes off the psiblock handcuffs. (And you know that if that's what she had she would do it.) There isn't going to be a way to prove your sanity before this shit is handled, and you pity her so hard right now.  
  
The drone is a looming terror-shape in the evening-gloom behind her, and it makes your hindbrain want to run and hide and blow everything in your path up simultaneously. You don't know how Terezi's got her back to it, but she does and she's walking with a beautiful showing of complete unconcern. Only the very finest zoom of your glasses-lens shows that her fingers are shaking a little on the cane-end. The drone does not have out a culling fork. Yet. At this point.  
  
There is also a robot. It has the signs of the Cruelest Bar and Most Puissant Guild of Legislacerators stamped on it, and its eyes are glowing the bright lime green that mean it's being piloted and watched through personally by somebody off-planet through an uplink. You don't know who Terezi had to contact, what favors she had to do or to promise, what irons she had to pull out of the fire, but there's a master legislacerator on the end of that keyboard and that master does not find Terezi entirely unamusing. Yet. At this point.  
  
Terezi comes to several steps from the entranceway, quarter-turns, gestures: the drone's scanning apparatus examines the door and the nameplate, presumably to cross-reference your hive and pull up your name and caste as its inhabitant. The robot stands beside it, coiled power, waiting, and when the drone pulls backwards it spreads its claws wide.  
  
You wish you could hear this. No audio pickup, and if you bring your psi too close they'll almost certainly detect it. The fact that you have eyes on this part at all, that she found a way to make that possible, is amazing enough in itself. You wish you could tell her you're as all right as you can be (which is not all right at all but present) and you're watching. You wish you could pull out as gorgeous a solution for her as she's produced with your new glasses, but honestly you kind of suck right now at planning. (You're worried you kind of suck right now period. What if her quadrant's flipped? What if she doesn't even hate you anymore? Why did you do this?)  
  
She went to a lot of trouble and you'd better fucking pay attention to what happens now or you'll waste what may be the last good thing anybody ever cares enough to do for you.  
  
You're just going to have to make up all the dialogue. And try not to fall into any wishful thinking.  
  
 _Robot_ : Well? What've you got that's worth this hassle to me, child?  
  
 _Terezi_ : Although it is perigees early, I have a petition to put to the Guild officially. I wish to declare myself a full adult, a citizen, and a Neophyte of your chapter, with intention to go off-planet as quickly as possible.  
  
She produces a sheaf of paperwork and hands it to the robot. You are intimately familiar with that sheaf. None of it is in less than triplicate. Some of it is in quintuplicate, if that is even a word. Lawyers. Filling it out properly had taken serious research, but you know she cracked it.  
  
The robot riffles through it, speed-read quickly, contemptuous, amused.  
  
 _Official_ : This all seems to be... in order. But you know that's not even close to being good enough. Your petition has been filed. Tell me why the Court shouldn't deny it, and you, with extreme prejudice.  
  
You can't quite bring yourself to make up the sheer plethora of legalese hoofbeastshit you know that that thing must be spouting, even though you've gotten pretty familiar with that sort of thing in the last while. You're sure you got the gist, though, since it fed the paperwork into a slot on its person, which hopefully does not lead directly to a paper-shredder.  
  
 _Petitioner_ : May it please the Court, Your Tyranny! (A spread of hands here, that shark-grin, that I-know-something-you-don't smile.) I have captured a miscreant, fleeing from the Empire's justice. I have handed down the verdict to... a starship-worthy yellowblood!  
  
 _Interrogator_ : Go on, young lady. If it's true, that is an interesting statement. How did you encounter such a creature? (You have to admit you're going entirely on assumptions on this bit because the robot has no body language, but the drone hasn't moved, so you can't figure out what else it would be saying.)  
  
 _Defendant_ : Because-- HE WAS MY MATESPRIT! (Shock. Awe. The courtroom in your mind goes wild. You've seen her do this speech a thousand times and she does it exactly as she planned to, except that her hands are still shaking. The details of how you met, fictitiously, how you became flushed for one another with you concealing the full extent of your powers. How she'd thought you were only a moderate psychic. How she'd become suspicious and investigated; how suspicion had given way to certainty. How she knows, Your Tyranny, she knows with certainty that since under her nose Alternia's laws had been broken and mangled when you did not go to the classifiers, so it must be by her hand that those laws are made whole again. She's been making variations on this sort of courtroom speech since she was two sweeps old and though you don't know what the adult thinks about the drama, the facts are definitely going over well.)  
  
In short, she's claiming you as treasure-trove and daring them to fight her for you. You hope they don't, of course. That fight's unwinnable.  
  
 _Empire_ : We see what happened here, all right, and we could certainly take that under consideration when it comes time for your Imperial recruitment. But there are a lot of subtleties about making a starship, you know. What about the Mother Grub? We can't neglect the genetics of our species. We don't want to breed the psychics out of it. A ship who's been taken before maturity is a prize, yes, but does damage as well as aid to Alternia. Not good enough for us to bring you straight off-planet. Certainly not good enough for us to let you keep him.  
  
This one you're brainscarringly sure of because the robot gestures to the drone and they both get two steps forward before Terezi steps between them and the door and stops them dramatically by decaptchaloguing a bucket. Which does stop them, fortunately. Terezi's shaking even harder, though still, you think, not very visibly, and a teal blush is spreading across her pointy cheekbones. Let them think that is all from embarrassment.  
  
It's a standard filial pail she's dropped in front of them, tight-sealed, red-colored, stamped with the heart symbol, and you vividly remember filling it. It had been awesome.  
  
The drone scoops it up with one big arm, rotates out an auxiliary limb-- this one's not primarily designed as a pail-bringer, it's a culling-drone, but they all have the capacity, as no one wants to waste any genetic material that a drone might happen to stumble on. (A lot of culled kids live on in the Empire's genepool, anonymous pails left hopefully in their hivestems when they go for examinations they know they will not return from. There'd never be a viable population of some of the spectra otherwise. Brain enough to do that means brain enough to pass your genes on: one of the Condesce's little jokes. You didn't know until you hacked into the drone system, and then you cried until you laughed about it. She even cheats at evolution.)  
  
You needed a culling-drone specifically for this bit. Their equipment is less specialized.  
  
Heart-stamped limb meets heart-stamped bucket and you see the sample needle go in, see the indicators blink all-well and the bucket disappear somewhere into the drone's armored body for storage. You have made your first genetic offering and it has gone down in the registration lists: _Terezi Pyrope ♥ Sollux Captor_.  
  
This feels a little weird, really. It's as close to an official acknowledgment of your adulthood as you, personally, are ever going to get. At least there's something. No matter how badly the rest of this goes, and even though your name is about to be stricken off the citizenship rolls of the Empire, your name will be on that registry which no one will probably ever look at or think about again, with hers, forever. It's just very strange. And kind of nifty?  
  
 _Master-legislacerator_ : Well. I see you are not entirely stupid. But it still isn't enough, and you know it. Or will you be sharing the benefits of your prize with somebody else, hmmm? Is there, in this matter, another concerned party?  
  
Here comes the dangerous part, the part which took all the time and the coding and which kept her away from you all this long, miserable day.  
  
 _Probationary-Neophyte_ : Oh, no, Your Tyranny. There is no one else involved here. You see-- (a dramatic gesture, a sweep of the cane to indicate that whatever she is about to say should be ridiculously, flamingly obvious--) You see, after I trapped the criminal, dispensed Justice to him, after I put the wires in and the malfeasant knew he could no longer dodge his duty to our Empire, after that HE BECAME MY KISMESIS!  
  
And she decaptchalogues the second pail, boom, on the pavement, and then flourishes and hands over to the robot the photo.  
  
The photo is a piece of art, you hope. It's of you in your ablution block, wired and tied in, bleeding and crying and looking like something scraped off the foot of a musclebeast. What she's spent the whole day doing is going off to a secure location the two of you set up very very very far out in the badlands and getting a forged Imperial timestamp impressed on it that swears up down and sideways that photo was taken between the time you filled that flushed bucket and the time you supposedly both got your pitch on. The drone will be able to measure the exact age of your genetic material, and Terezi has slapped a timestamp seal on the side of the black bucket, also, just in case the lawyer doesn't think to ask it.  
  
In actuality the two of you had waited three days after finishing the red bucket, eaten a lot of protein, and done the same thing all over again. What you remember of that part is a large amount of nervous giggling and panic. Age of sample, genes found present, colors of donors, these things are simple even for a culling-drone, but the complex flavor-change of tiny proteins which signals the difference between red-made sludge and black-made slurry, the encoded or unencoded waste-genes which signal pity or hate and the relative strength of them-- you are betting your lives that this drone cannot read that.  
  
The robot lawyer has to take the photo and accept it into evidence. If it doesn't, you're fucked sideways in one second of blurry slow-motion as though your cameras have started recording everything at a truly ludicrous framerate which almost makes you hallucinate it disdainfully brushing the idea off  
  
but it takes the photo, and causes it to vanish. Gestures to the drone. The drone picks up the other bucket, passes it carefully to the spade-embossed arm. You think you'd freak right out again if your brain were capable of doing so twice in a row so quickly, but you don't think you're physically able to at this point. A moment later it's all over, armor opened and closed again safely. The second registry: _Terezi Pyrope ♠ Sollux Captor_.  
  
The Neophyte has apprehended her first fugitive and the Empire acknowledges that she has done so in a way which, as it ought to, does very well for everyone who matters (in this situation, everyone but you). Everything legal and open and aboveboard, beyond all reproaching. She may keep her prize, as honor dictates.  
  
The robot bows shallowly to Terezi, neither contemptuous nor terribly respectful, the gesture one well-standing legislacerator might make to another if they happened to pass in a corridor. Spits out a whole huge pile of yet more fancy-looking paperwork, all of which boils down in your head to _you won you won you won you made it_ , though of course they'll use much drier language. The Imperial representative swivels, beckoning the drone behind it, and is gone into the darkness of the evening.  
  
Terezi takes one last thing from her sylladex, the noose which is the sign of official Guild membership, and hangs it from her belt, no longer bragging. Turns around to climb up a building and find out whether she still has a boyfriend, or a starship, or both things, or neither.  
  
You are adults now. You feel pretty different. You still want Terezi.  
  
Assuming she still wants you now she's got you.  
  
  
  
When she opens the ablutions cubicle you know she must have noticed the insulation dotting the floor of the stairwell, the subdued crackle of psionics lacing its way around your bare wire. You are so glad they took the photo, didn't demand to come up and have a look at you. You'd have had to fake some combination of insanity and exhaustion and lack of your true strength, then, to disguise the fact that anyone entering your hive is in your killzone from the second they come through the outside door. Probably should have thought of that before you made the mess, but you weren't exactly clearheaded at the time, were you. Anything to accomplish your one single goal today, but you're not a great actormentor and you're happy you don't have to be.  
  
So she knows you don't just want to kill her or she wouldn't have survived to walk up physically in front of you. What she can't know is whether you're too nuts to notice things, or if you're wanting to see the look on her face when she dies, or something of that sort. Her face is blank when she strides in, adult calm all the way, and your eyes don't have as much resolution as your cameras so you can't tell whether she is still shaking and if so how badly, except, well, not bad enough for your focus-blurred non-enhanced meatware to pick up on. You are looking forward to having every inch of your vicinity wired the hell up so this sort of thing never happens.  
  
Your voice is a croak but an audible one, good.  
  
"Captain. You return triumphant."  
  
No change in her face, no rush to hug you, but she knows you did your duty now, your job as hard as hers was. And that you know what she has managed.  
  
"Recruit," she returns, formally. Lines of her face set, no trace of her smile. "I am pleased to notify you that my negotiation with the Guild of Legislacerators went entirely in my favor, and that you have been legally and justly released into my service for whatever quantity of time I choose to consider reasonable. Your name has been stricken from the list of Imperial citizens and entered in the rolls of Helmsmen, and your former possessions are now considered my spoils."  
  
She's pacing, back and forth and around you, slowly, no doubt pondering the tearstains on your cheeks and chin, the spatters of blood randomly coating bits of you, the never-faded stickiness between your thighs, which has started up hard again seeing her and knowing she has you. Knowing you're her thing. The mind honey dripping on your chest. Jegus you are such a hot mess right now. It's stupid but you kind of wish for pants.  
  
When she gets all the way behind you you can't see her at all, only hear her, rustle of fabric, quiet hmm-ing as she continues her inspection. "I own you now," she continues quietly, and your bloodpusher stutters because the only tone in that is hard and ice-cold, vicious cheerful gloating. "I own every part of you and you are mine forever. I can do whatever I want with you."  
  
Oh gog she's flipped for you hasn't she. It's pitch-black you're hearing in that voice, hate not pity, isn't it, and your life is going to be a waking nightmare until and unless you can flip your quadrant too to match but you don't think you can after all she's done for you not TZ you can't flip for Terezi--  
  
There's a cool touch on your hips from behind, the graze of her claws on the small of your back and around your glutes. You can't feel it but looking down to see if you can glimpse even the tips of her fingers you can see what she's doing, she is spreading your legs, getting them as far apart as she can for the weight of them. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck--  
  
She makes a small, disapproving noise of annoyance. "Well, those don't go too far, do they. Your bad luck, Helmsman. You know our ship specs as well as I do."  
  
You do know them. It's going to be aggravating as fuck for a couple of sweeps, because what the two of you could afford is pretty much Baby's First Helmsblock and it's got a pilot-column so narrow it wouldn't take anyone much wider at all than your too-skinny ass. Which means you're going to be absolutely covered in wires and wetware and miscellaneous objects which would ordinarily go somewhere below you, and your Captain's not going to have the access to your junk that a Shipwright usually expects. She'll be able to get at your bulge, since it, you know, moves around a bit, and with careful planning and some jury-rigged furniture she should be able to get on it. She'll be able to poke at your seedflap, not that that helps anybody much.  
  
But right here, right now, is the last time she'll be able to get herself up your nook until the two of you make enough money to fix it, and a Fleet-issue sex parasite, impressive as you've found them before, is just not going to be the same as your matesprit.  
  
Or, from the way she's standing behind you and drawing her claws slowly down the skin of your mid-back which was pretty much the only place left on your body that didn't hurt even a little, your kismesis.  
  
The warmth of her bulge under your tailbone and the sharp heat of her clawmarks coincide suddenly, and you sob once as you feel her pushing and twisting, the tip splaying all over your glutes and leaving sticky trickles. That fabric rustling you heard must have been her stripping. You wonder if she's dripping on your wire, but it's still insulated there, can't really feel much from it. She probably bends her knees a little then, because her bulge quests right between your not-legs, stroking over your waste chute, rippling over too-sensitive nerve endings. She can't reach your aching nook and you both know it.  
  
You don't think you've ever been turned on this much in your entire life, actually, with the muscles you don't have anymore wishing they could spread you just that tiny bit further, cant your hips back, something, anything, and your own body the cage you are battering against. To no effect. You're crying hard now, just the way she's always liked it, and your bulge is so far out and questing in thin air it's aching just the way your nook does.  
  
She times a particularly vicious thrust with a pull of her fingers at the sensitive stubs of your grub-legs on your rib-sides, and it rolls through you like fire, like a firestorm, the burning made both better and more awful by the realization that that shove could have gotten at least a little of her inside you and _she just didn't want to_. You shout, hoarsely, questioning-hurt-needy, and her teeth push into the nape of your neck like an answer.  
  
"Well," she says, licking blood off her lips smackingly, fake-purring, "I guess my Helmsman has to have something up his greedy little self for his off-planet sendoff," and you don't mean to answer her,  
  
"Come on, Terezi, FUCK ME," and you sound so stupid needy and it's only simple truth.  
  
All you get for that is more of her fake purr, no real cheer in it, and something thin and hard and narrow coming towards the front of you, which your bulge wraps around in a lick of jolting pleasure and then has to let go of when the thing keeps moving backwards. You open your eyes looking down again (been bad at tracking closing those lately).  
  
She's feeding her cane through your legs from the front, arms around you, ground-tip of the instrument already sticking out behind you somewhere and she's stopped pressing against you to let it by her. The cold line of it is sliding inexorably backwards through your wetness, smearing and stuttering until she drops the front down away from you at an angle so your bulge won't tangle around the tip of the dragon's jaw, the nubbly carved bits around the head of the cane.  
  
And then she presses that head up again, inexorably, the cone of the dragon's head shoving into you where you most need something. It's hard and it's rough and it isn't shaped right and it hurts you, the walls of your nook ready for something wet and twisting and not this sharp unyieldingness. It's so huge and it's huge differently from a nookworm and you wonder if you're bleeding around it as she starts to really push and you can't see through this, shaking, your whole body is shaking as though your own psionics were grounding themselves up and down you. The noises you are making are animal.  
  
It's a vicious fuck, somewhere beyond pain, where pain and pleasure have turned inside-out on you, and you wish she'd even put her bulge against your back again because that would be better, but this is too good, too good as it is, perfect and horrible. You never want it to stop at the same time as you can't take it. Somewhere downstairs, your cameras are shorting out. You're chewing on your own lip even more than usual and still, you know, futilely trying to get your legs open. So wet and ready for her and it doesn't stop being shaped wrong, your own fluids just don't help slick you. Did she try it on herself first so she knows precisely how uncomfortable her cane is? Or didn't she care that much?  
  
"I'm going to have to remember to replace those sugared beetles," she remarks from behind you. "Guess that compartment doesn't seal so well from that direction," and the sheer humiliation of that is like a slap, ratcheting you that one notch higher, tightening something that's been near-snapping since she strung you up. You're going to come without a claw of hers touching you, you can feel it in the very near future, and it's going to break you in a way you do not want to contemplate.  
  
One last chance, if maybe this is the final part of her present to you. If it still could be.  
  
"Override," you whisper, and then force it out beyond a whisper. If you're wrong you will never live down that you said it. But if you're wrong you're finished as you anyway. "Override, TZ."  
  
Then there's the clatter of her cane on the tiles and the cool length of her all up and down your support column except her hips canted carefully away from your new jacks and wire. Her arms go around you.  
  
"There is no override, Sollux," she whispers back to you. You can hear she is sobbing, too, feel it against you. "You set it up that way yourself. But I am still flushed for you."  
  
The relief is like a new form of pain, perfect and beautiful. "Always and forever," you tell her unsteadily. "Now get around here and do it right, why don't you."  
  
"It would be all right if we did flip, sometime," she tells you as she slides around you, skin not leaving skin for even an instant, ducking under what used to be your upper arm. "We'd survive it. We'd even enjoy it."  
  
"Probably," you admit, enjoying the feel of her on your chest and your stomach. "But not at the moment." Not when everything else is changing so fast.  
  
She hears what you don't say too, and you see the pity in her face as she tilts her head up to kiss you. "No," she says between little licking kisses. "Me neither," which makes no sense except for how you know what she means.  
  
Then she slides her tongue into your mouth and her bulge into your nook in the same rhythm.  
  
Your body decides that enough is enough, that today has been one long session of torture and home brain surgery, brutal, brutal teasing and proscribed hallucinogens, and the only way to make up for it is with the sort of screaming orgasm that without your limiters would literally be visible from orbit. As it is you set a fire in the stairwell and can't make yourself remotely care about it because this just. Keeps. Going. Every time she twitches in you you whimper again and drench her, and she's pulled you inside her too while you were a little distracted. It sets off a kind of chain reaction where she moves, so you clench, so your bulge writhes, so she clenches, so she moves again. Soon enough there's teal fluid adding to the quantities of yellow and her gasping, sweaty, beautiful face hovers in front of you, racked with blurry pleasure.  
  
It was like this when you filled your buckets, setting each other off and off and off again, wet from the waist down. This time you're sore inside, bruised and maybe swollen, and that only makes it better. You can feel every crevice of your nook in high relief, not to mention the wonderful tight cold wetness that is every crevice of Terezi's.  
  
The two of you come down slowly. For a while one of you so much as breathing will set the other one off again, but finally sheer exhaustion takes over, your bulges twining in a last caress as you come out of each other and retreat slowly back into your own bodies. You lick absently around the base of one of her horns. It would be nice to be able to put an arm around her.  
  
There was something important. Oh yeah. What was it?  
  
"Captain," you mutter muzzily into her hair, "the thtairs are on fire."  
  
She leans into you and just starts laughing.  
  
  
  
There's going to be a lot to do, later.  
  
She'll have to pull you off the ceiling and get you onto a mobile hanging rack; she'll have to dose you with the drugs that let a Helmsman get some sleep without sopor. You'll have a vicious argument about the way she's not letting you eat before you get to the ship, with your argument being basically 'Hungry!' and her argument being basically 'Plumbing!', and she'll give in and feed you just because you've gotten so damn cranky. You'll talk her through the delicate procedure that is coding the uninstallation and reinstallation of your beehive, because it's going to be a test of skill to keep from crushing them at higher Gs but it took you years to build up those silicomb database systems and you're keeping them. She'll free your lusus and he'll lope off into the badlands.  
  
She'll take you, on your hanging rack in a groundcar, to see her lusus, and you'll get the sense of a massive telepathic judging presence which will roll through you from top to bottom and weigh every part of you and... decide not to leave either of you, actually: the dragoneggmom says she'll call you back to the planet when she hatches, and her thoughts for that will be red and hilarious, apocalypse fire and bloodthirsty. It will be more than a little disturbing, but rather sweet. She will also tell you the frog is purple, and you will have no idea what she is talking about.  
  
Finally, after throwing out your furniture and selling hers on the internet, Terezi will take you to your new body and you will strap on a starship. You have no idea what that is going to be like, but your bet from years of flying in your previous body is somewhere between 'glorious' and 'too ludicrously awesome to think about'. The two of you will argue over every single detail of the Fleet specs and modifications, some tech-geek arguments and some about things you both genuinely find upsetting ("I'm not going to pull your outer fangs just so I have somewhere I can stick my bulge without even asking you, Sollux! You know how... she... was about that..." "We could get rid of my gogdamn lithp, TZ, do it." "Maybe I like hearing you talk like you, have you ever thought of that?" and she will slap you and neither of you will ever bring it up again).  
  
And then you will set course for upwards, and cast off Alternia like the shell of a cluckbeast, and the stars will be a playground for the two of you. You have paid enough for them. You hope you like it.  
  
But right now you're tired, and cuddling, and the fire will take a while to become a problem, and you don't and you can't have your arms around her but you feel as though you do on some level and that's going to have to be enough for the moment. She's right where she should be, cheek over your heart, and she's still laughing.  
  
"Good ship," she says, "best friend."  
  
"You are my best friend too," you tell her, and you mean it with everything you are now.  
  
For a moment, in the depths of your being, you believe that you've both done the right thing.


End file.
